


On The Nature of Daylight

by mr-finch (soubriquet)



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Hand Jobs, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-12
Updated: 2013-03-12
Packaged: 2017-12-05 03:01:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/718118
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/pseuds/mr-finch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Part of a series that asks what would happen if Snow was the one saved by Harold on the rooftop, rather than Reese.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On The Nature of Daylight

**Author's Note:**

> As requested by Cooper.
> 
> "By which this sum of things recruited lives,  
> Those same infallibly can never die,  
> Nor nothing to nothing evermore return.  
> And, too, the selfsame power might end alike  
> All things, were they not still together held  
> By matter eternal, shackled through its parts,  
> Now more, now less. A touch might be enough  
> To cause destruction. For the slightest force  
> Would loose the weft of things wherein no part  
> Were of imperishable stock. But now  
> Because the fastenings of primordial parts  
> Are put together diversely and stuff  
> Is everlasting, things abide the same  
> Unhurt and sure, until some power comes on  
> Strong to destroy the warp and woof of each:  
> Nothing returns to naught; but all return  
> At their collapse to primal forms of stuff."  
> ― Lucretius, On The Nature of Things

When Snow first meets Elias, he isn't interested. Just another mob boss; maybe this one's quirk is a long vocabulary, but he doesn't care. He's not intimidated or impressed, just trying to get his day job done.

He's a little more focused on actually accomplishing his job than anything else, because recently Finch has taken to rattling off fault-lines they've created (never quite errors he's made), or ways in which circumstances could have been avoided, with each number. It shouldn't necessarily be punishment, but he knows it is. Just as a teacher would've rapped the back of his knuckles, so too he feels the snap-snap-snap of every criticism Finch gives him. And his knuckles are starting to bruise.

So when he walks into Elias's shelf-lined room - with a literary taste like that, he might liken it to the centre of his kingdom - Snow's hands are clasped behind his back and his dark suit is pinching slightly at his shoulders, like it always does.

"I have an offer for you, Mr. Snow," says the boss, smiling gamely and leaning his elbows on the desk like Mark's just made his week by opening the door. "I think you may find it of interest."

Snow breaks out from disinterest into the curve of a one-cornered smirk with the barest flash of teeth behind it, glancing aside, before returning his gaze. "Somehow I don't think my employer would like that."

"He wouldn't," Elias agrees, good-humouredly. "But it's not for him to decide. I'm asking  _you._ "

Snow shakes his head in a flat line: one-two. "I'm only here because of him. As soon as I'm no longer useful, well, you know Guantanamo."

It's not a heart-felt confession. Even knowing that Finch can hear him doesn't mean a thing. It's just fact; unvoiced fact by the both of them.

"I'm curious about you, Mark." Elias is still smiling, although it dips now and then into seriousness like he's associating it with something. "Whenever John met with me, it was always somewhere we were both protected." He glances over at the door and tips a finger at it. "You've walked right in here. For a first meeting, that's bold, even with your credentials. It makes me wonder, what kind of boss doesn't give his employee that luxury?"

"Someone who knows I'll get the job done." It's Snows turn to sound impenetrable, his voice like metal skates curving over ice. 

"See- that's what I thought." Elias' finger drops, coming to rest on his thumb like the rest. "The man behind the suit wouldn't send someone he couldn't trust, but he never struck me as cruel."

So it's vocabulary  _and_  speeches. Interesting speeches though, at least.

"How did he get you here?"

Snow smile-smirks again, glances away and back again. "He sent me. Orders."

Elias blinks, kind of slow, like a waiting cat. "Mark, when I offer my respect I expect it in return, as much as it's worth. So I'll ask you again: how did he get you here?"

It takes him a moment, just a moment, like the second of silence at the end of a song. Then Snow continues, with just as much contempt. "He freed me from a bomb vest."

The guy sits silent at his desk in response, but his voice doesn't change from the same cadence as if he were discussing the weather. "The night John died."

"He didn't make it," Snow says. "He took his ex-partner out with him and made the FBI's job that much easier."

He's no stranger to meeting people he doesn't know and watching them be affected by John Reese. Or the lack of him. Mostly the lack.

Either Elias has already heard, or he's better at hiding it than the majority. Snow doesn't mind what they do anymore, he's been carting around one of his favourite reactions for the better part of two months and that's turning into an interesting pet project.

Elias had sat upright while Snow waited on stand-by, and he doesn't have his elbows on the desk anymore. "I think you and I could benefit one another."

"This your offer?"

He puts his hands on the edge of the desk, pushes his chair back. "I would offer you a place in my organization-" Standing now, with his hands in his front pockets. "But you wouldn't be interested."

Elias unsheathes his hands and rounds the back of his desk, heading closer. "After I spoke with you today, I thought I might offer you a position higher up on the chain." 

He inclines his head, looks at Snow. "But you wouldn't work for me. You already have a handler, but you're not really working for him either, are you?"

"See the interesting thing about you, Mark, is not that Harold sent you without any care for your safety." Elias steps close and stops, less than a foot away from him. "It's that he sent you at all."

"Yeah?" Mark squints at him, having to narrow his eyes to focus this close, then tilts his chin upward. "Well don't ask the questions you already know the answer to."

Elias shifts, drawing up one of Snow's hands between them both before enclosing it in two of his own, like he's being honest. "I won't."

Snow only watches him, waiting for something, before he detaches his hand from Elias' grip and presses his index knuckle into the hollow where his brow meets his nose, trying to push some of the deeper exhaustion away.

They're both still watching each other. Snow wonders briefly if this is the same offer Elias gave John.

"I was fond of him," the guy says, several inches below. "He saved my life, once. But he never let me come this close." He raises his right hand and brushes two fingers over the bone of Snow's cheek. "Always wary." His index curves ever-light around Snow's jaw and stops on his bottom lip, weighing it down just a fraction.

"I was like that, once." 

Elias' touch moves as soon as Mark speaks, turning into his whole hand gently clutching Mark's jaw. "Really. And what made you change?"

"Circumstances," Snow says, with a fleeting half-smile, like the memory of a challenge. 

"Funny what a bomb vest will do for the constitution," says Elias, enacting light pressure through the pads of his fingers, as if he's seeing whether Mark will turn his head. He does.

Snow's eyes slide shut, "Ever had one?"

"Never had the chance." 

He can feel Elias' other hand on his collar, doing away with buttons like it's just an average day. His first hand remains secure on those five points and palm - a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y. 

"If I asked you to make me wear one, would you?" Snow asks.

The hand on his chest stills for a moment. Mark doesn't open his eyes. 

"I might," says Elias. He lets go of Mark's chin and unbuttons the rest of his shirt, removing the dark jacket that doesn't quite fit and the white shirt one at a time, taking the time to set them down somewhere, until Mark is down to his undershirt.

Elias' hands return, insinuating themselves under the straps over his shoulders. "I'm pretty sure you had one on already."

It's a good call. Mark chuckles. "I don't believe in limited contracts."

To that, Elias laughs in return. "Maybe so. Back against the wall, please."

He obeys, glancing down at the floor and stepping back until his heels hit solid surface. Still with his eyes semi-open, Snow follows Elias' movements towards him. His dick is a hot, insistent reminder of what contact can do to him when it's given, these days.

Approving contact, that is.

"What did Harold ask you to do, Mark?" 

"He told me to 'renew our relationship with Carl Elias'." Snow says, between faster breaths, a smile curling each corner of his mouth.

Elias' smile is more genuine, less ravenous shark and more enraptured mammal. "And did he tell you how?"

Snow shrugs one shoulder, his expression still an anticipatory challenge. "Up to you."

It seems he's proven himself in some way, because Elias has his knuckles planted at his hips and seems quite the opposite of displeased. One of his hands detaches from a hip and gestures towards Snow. "Undo your pants and take off your shirt."

In the meantime, Elias takes off his own shoes and removes his trousers, and Snow is momentarily greedily pleased to see the look that crosses his face when he stretches out of his undershirt. 

Mark undoes his fly and is about to pull himself out when Elias interrupts him, coming forward and pressing the tips of his right hand's fingers to Snow's abdomen, as his left pulls the waistband of the underwear away from his skin and takes him out that way, rolling one thumb up the base of his erection. 

They're abominably close like this, and luckily Elias leans up at the same time Snow does and they meet mouths, tongues involved immediately before teeth, and Snow's cock right between them. 

Even with this, which in any normal situation would be the signal for give and take, Snow doesn't move any further. His fingernails dig into the elbows of the shirt Elias is wearing, and his head tilts downward to kiss him, but he's not pulling him closer or taking too much. Only what he's allotted.

Elias breaks away from his lips with a patient sigh. 

"I find it hard to believe he didn't warn you."

Responses are more difficult now, between the rise-and-fall of his chest and Elias' hand slowly jerking him off. He does it in such a way that Snow doesn't know a part of his dick that isn't being stroked, just this constant state of stimulation that surely shifts and moves but feels like Elias has him completely. 

"Maybe he  _is_  cruel," Snow says, breath catching on the end of it, and his fingers fluctuate in their holds like he's not certain whether or not it's right to hold him. "He didn't tell me."

Elias considers this response, in his stoic way, before canting his head again and asking: "Have you done this before?"

His shoulder blades slide up against the wall as Snow stretches unintentionally. He smiles again. "Not in as many words-" the smile drops between his teeth as Elias' pace quickens, "but yeah."

It earns him another kiss: a hot mismatch of his mouth and Elias' mouth, and for the first time that evening he's aware of Elias' arousal - cerebrally, he'd already been aware, but not in quite the same way as a heated pressure against his thigh. 

Elias' eyes are closed now. "What happened?" he asks him, teeth bared right next to Snow's mouth, and reaching down with his free hand to touch himself through his boxers. 

Snow obeys, turning his head just enough to murmur the truth straight into his ear. "She tied me up, more than once. I liked it. We didn't make for great colleagues back then."

"And now?" asks Elias, detaching one of Snow's hands from his elbow and guiding it down to close over his own erection, under his waistband. 

"Fucked-up for the foreseeable future," Mark says, shuddering into Elias' hand. "Killed so many people it's like some god doesn't want to give me the same chance."

Elias breathes, "faster, please" and Snow spits into his hand, trying not to tell him Elias could do anything he wanted to him and Snow would only ask that he make it worse. 

It's uncomfortable; of course it's uncomfortable, with both of them standing trying not to let their legs shake too much, Snow's bony shoulder blades hitting against the wall, and Elias' hand on his dick with only his pre-come to make it easier. It shouldn't be this simple to get him off, not with his age or his reputation for taking interrogation without a flinch, but Elias isn't asking him about Harold Finch.

Snow tries to warn him when he's down to seconds, but Elias only grabs his jaw and takes his breath away from him. Even though Mark groans into his mouth and bites Elias' bottom lip for a way to ground himself, the guy keeps going, like Mark's something he can't get too much of and needs more than skin will give.

"I think we always worked better when she had one over on me," he murmurs into Elias, and watches him come, hips bucking up between them and his cock jerking in Snow's hand. 

Elias has his teeth together and his lip is cherry-red when he backs off, and he runs his tongue briefly over the teethmarks ringed inside his mouth. He looks the same quiet stoic as he always does, but his eyes are darker and he exudes a sense of calm satisfaction. 

It's what Mark feeds himself with as Elias readjusts his boxers and pulls on his trousers. He knows what  _he_  looks like. He's seen it in mirrors, webcams, reflections, before. Dark eyes and cherry lips seem pretty consistent with the rest of humanity.

Once Elias has put himself back together, except for the notable patch on the front of his shirt, he perches on the edge of his desk, folds his arms and looks back at Snow. "I've decided on my offer."

"Oh?" Mark says, leaning against the wall without a care for his state of undress.

"Once every two weeks, you come here. You're not official, and while you're here you'll only answer to me."

Neither of them mention how Finch may be listening right now. It's taken for granted that his authority supersedes it all.

Snow shifts and folds his arms in return. "And if I say no?"

"I'm not asking."

It makes him grin. It brings back the shark-smile, and Snow signs his name.


End file.
